


Red Sky At Morning

by crowleyshouseplant (orphan_account)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-31
Updated: 2011-10-31
Packaged: 2017-10-25 03:22:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/271186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/crowleyshouseplant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And Sam prayed: Aziel, Castiel, Lamisniel, Rabam</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red Sky At Morning

Castiel—unbound by flesh and blood, a wavelength of celestial intent that consists mostly of something like watching and something like listening, though too intense and too burning and too consuming to be encapsulated with language that could be spoken by throats and tongues without scorching them, that could be contained because every single verb was too small to depict how Castiel was above the earth, below the earth, enfolding the earth with the limited expanse of wings, within the earth as grace, outside of chemistry, whispering against electrons, breathing against neutrons, and cupping protons, each one different, each one a different facet of Father, each one a reflection, each one passing harmlessly through grace, untouching, unnoticing, distant, and gone—hears  _Castiel_  spoken on the earth by a human tongue for the first time, hears  _Castiel_  spoken for a second time since a fish crawled up on the land and Joshua spoke  _don’t step on that fish, Castiel—big plans for that fish_.

And Castiel who once watched the fish—still watching the fish swimming in their globular fish bowl of earth and wind and rain and sky—who once spoke to the fish when no one listened—realizes that the fish is finally aware, that the fish recognize, that one of them speaks  _Castiel_ , finally fulfilling the promises their scientists uttered with eager lips and minds snatching after flashes of abstract concepts, each one a half-forgotten syllable, a half-heard echo of Father:  _for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction_ .

“Aziel, Castiel, Lamisniel, Rabam,” Sam Winchester says—no reads—and Castiel feels something, a backward-moving rippling of motion as the book cradled in his hands fall into awareness because Sam is reciting, just like the hunters recite with the exorcism chants—they recite without speaking, without comprehending.

Castiel is the only who has come. Aziel and Lamisniel and Rabam are gone. Elsewhere. Castiel wonders why they do not come, why they ignore the sound of their names, when no one speaks them for millenia—Father silent, siblings silent, watching, still like stones as fish flutter against their sides before vanishing over waterfalls.

Castiel understands what Sam is reading before the words fall from Sam’s mouth. Sees the one with the missing hand. Sees the woman, Bela, bent double as water floods her body, spews from her mouth, oxygen blocked by the epiglottis over her airway. Somehow, Dean Winchester believes that if he kneels beside her, if he wraps his arms over her shoulders as if he could pull her from an ocean so that she flops on the sand, this will save her from drowning, even as he shouts for Sammy to keep reading.

Castiel hears the Latin, understands the prayer that Sam shouts over wind and rain even if he mistakes it for a mere summoning ritual. For the first time, Castiel enters the heaven of one of Father’s other children. Castiel registers it as something peaceful with the lilting cerulean blue of summer seas, sun making the leaves and the water iridescent, and the soul, himself, on his back, salt-water kisses lapping his entire body, his eyes half-lidded under the rays of a sun that has no power to blind him even as it warms him, stokes the fire and the blood in his body so that he thrives and does not drown or become weary.

 _You are wanted_ , Castiel says without mouth or tongue or voice and, before the soul can ask why, before the soul can protest, Castiel pulls him from heaven and deposits him before the angry soul with the missing hand while Sam Winchester reads, while Dean Winchester clutches a drowning woman, who, on her knees, pleads silently for mercy though only Castiel hears it, her clothes and flesh and bone translucent rags hiding nothing.

The shucked souls, not at rest as they should be, speak to each other, and Castiel hears them as if they come from a great distance, beyond the circle of sibling-hood, and does not understand because Castiel would never kill Father’s children, siblings every one, even if it were possible, even if they were not immortal, and, as Castiel folds back space to be both  _there_ with the brother’s hands bound behind his waist, his feet scrabbling for purchase against air molecules that provide no friction for his leathery soles, as the rope cinches tighter with gravity around his neck, collapsing the air ways and snapping the spinal column, and  _here_ with Dean Winchester, Dean who bartered away his soul, the only part of him that is immortal, for his brother. Castiel remembers the soul taken from heaven, a soul that had hanged his brother’s, a soul stained with blood and, because humanity is finite and there will only ever be a finite amount of heavens for each finite human soul, Castiel comprehends with every grace-fused molecule of being that there is no space for Dean in heaven, not when his soul no longer belongs to Father, and Castiel realizes with a rush of thunder and lightening that Dean’s great sin is loving his brother too much to watch him die, loving him too much to bury his brother, loving him so much he would cut off his hand, cut off that and so much more of himself to spare his brother, that he has stretched himself so thin, reaching so high so that he can taste the ashes of the angels who never have to watch their siblings die.

 

The rain stops. The souls of the sailor brothers are gone from this particular plane of existence. Castiel returns to the brother’s heaven, but the waters are still like glass. Cerulean blues fade to grey. The sun dies and the chlorophyll in the plant life starve until they are no longer green in this eternal resting place.

  


Then Uriel appears.  _Why are you here, Castiel?_

It is the third time that name has been released from private solitude. It is strange to have it spoken twice when, before, Castiel had been unaware of missing its shape in someone else’s consciousness, missing the weight of receiving it from another being. _This was a heaven once. Where did he go?_

Uriel is silent for a moment or another thousand years.  _As our father dictates—to his rightful place._ Then Uriel leaves.

Castiel wonders if Uriel refers to hell, almost inquires for verification, but desists. Before, if another angel had descended with Castiel into a graveyard wet with rain and burdened with too many words and bearing the weight of the crushed souls of a man and woman, and had spoken of a hell for the man who had killed his sibling, his brother, the intensity of Castiel’s celestial intent would not have faltered. But now, as the sky diminishes and the horizon edges Castiel’s being where before it had not constricted so closely, Castiel replays the question  _where did he go?_  and wonders, as the heaven curls closer, crowding and pushing, why those words carve a hole within that needs to be filled.

 

Without the human soul, the heaven collapses, leaving Castiel alone in a space between spaces.


End file.
